Former Royal Mail chief earned £2.43m last year despite strikes

Royal Mail’s former chief executive was paid £2.43m last year as the postal service suffered crippling national strikes.

Adam Crozier’s pay included a £1.57m bonus, which made him the best paid public sector worker, with the exception of some bankers.

His salary, which had been frozen for the past three years, was £633,000.

Crozier’s pay was the equivalent of 105 times the average salary of a full-time postal worker. The starting salary for a postman in London was £16,324, but even including all their overtime pay and benefits this reaches just £23,000, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Last year postmen were paid a bonus of £400 on average.

Dave Ward, the deputy general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, said: “Postal workers will be outraged by news of Crozier’s salary and bonus.

“Adam Crozier’s bonus came after a year in which he oversaw a national postal strike, lost the confidence of his workforce and then left before the job of modernisation and business transformation was complete.”

Crozier left Royal Mail at the end of March to take up the chief executive post at ITV, where he is expected to earn as much as £3m in his first year, if he hits various targets.

Moya Greene, the head of Canada Post, will take over at Royal Mail in July, but sources have suggested she will be paid considerably less than Crozier.

Mark Higson, the managing director of the letters business – the part of the company that went on strike – picked up £1.73m in total, made up of a salary of £428,000, a short-term bonus of £221,000, various other benefits and a long-term bonus of £1.01m.

Royal Mail said it had paid out smaller short-term bonuses last year than the previous year, and total pay had increased purely because the long-term bonuses were only paid out once every three years.

Donald Brydon, chairman of Royal Mail Group, said: “These directors are running a business with a turnover in excess of £9bn in a tough marketplace, and Royal Mail needs to be able to attract from the commercial market the best management talent.”